Pages

Thursday, November 10, 2016

The American Association of University Professors warned in a statement on Wednesday that many college faculty members fear that President-elect Donald J. Trump “may be the greatest threat to academic freedom since the McCarthy period.”

The organization’s first public statement on the election cited statements made by Mr. Trump and policies he has proposed that it said would threaten academic freedom.

“His remarks about minorities, immigrants, and women have on some campuses had a chilling effect on the rights of students and faculty members to speak out,” it said.

The AAUP also took issue with Mr. Trump’s lack of “clear and detailed policy proposals for higher education.” It urged him and Congress to listen to faculty members and educational leaders when devising higher-education policy.

Friday, November 4, 2016

Tiffany C. Martínez, a sociology major at Suffolk University, made waves last week when sheblogged about an experiencein which she said her professor had called her out in front of her classmates and accused her of copying parts of an assignment. Ms. Martínez said she was particularly upset that her professor had circled the word "hence" and written in the margin,"This is not your language."

Though she said she understood that her professor was questioning whether the paper was plagiarized and probably didn’t intend for the comment to carry a racial tone, the words still hurt.

The incident is a clear example of a perceivedmicroaggression, and prompts a question: How can institutions ensure instructors enjoy academic freedom while also pushing them to be mindful of students’ racial backgrounds and experiences?

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

October 18, 2016 from the Chronicle of Higher Ed [Originally from the Pittsburgh Post]

Faculty members in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education plan to go on strike Wednesday morning if contract negotiations do not yield a new contract,thePittsburgh Post-Gazettereports.

System officials and union representatives continued their talks Monday evening in order to avert a strike. An embargo on the negotiations has kept students, staff members, and the public in the dark, but an agreement seems possible. The union signaled in a statement on Friday that it would stay at the table past Sunday if there was progress.

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Texas’campus-carry lawhas had well-publicized effects on the state’s public colleges: A handful of professors have resigned in protest, thousands of dollars have been spent on educational materials, and mobs of students havestrapped dildos to their backpacksin protest.

But in the conversation about the effects of the law, one campus constituency has been largely overlooked: graduate students. At the University of Texas at Austin, that’s changed, as a small handful of graduate students have started holding office hours in a bar — admittedly, a softer kind of protest.

Friday, October 7, 2016

But numbers also show some are centralizing services, which could save money

The Hechinger Report

Post-it notes stick to the few remaining photos hanging on the walls of the University of Maine System offices, in a grand brick, renovated onetime W.T. Grant department store built in 1948.

The notes are instructions for the movers, since the pictures and everything else are in the midst of being packed up and divided among the system’s seven campuses.

Only 20 people work here now, down from a peak of 120, and the rest will soon be gone, too, following their colleagues and fanning out to the campuses. Disassembled cubicles and crates of documents are piled in the corners of the 36,000-square-foot space, and light shines from the doors of the few lonely offices still occupied. All of the agency’s three floors in the building, in a quiet part of town near a statue of Bangor native hero and Abraham Lincoln’s first-term vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, have been put up for sale.

Friday, September 16, 2016

A gun was accidentally discharged on Wednesday night in a dormitory at Tarleton State University,The Texas Tribunereports.The incident occurred less than two months after aTexas lawallowing permit holders to carry weapons on public-college campusestook effect.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

Faculty members at Pennsylvania’s 14 state-owned universities could soon go on strike.

More than 80 percent of faculty members of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties (APSCUF) took part in a vote last week, and 93 percent of those who participated voted to authorize a strike. Contract negotiations predating the June 2015 expiration of the union’s pact with the state system have failed to produce any results.

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

The annual college rankings byU.S. News & World Reportare out today, and with their release will come a predictable round of excoriating assessments from journalists, college officials, and others.The Atlantic’sDerek Thompson has calledthis annual chorus a “national carpfest.” Consider mine an early voice in this year’s bray-a-thon.READ MORE

Monday, September 12, 2016

When Kiyonda Hester started the final year of her master’s program in social work, on Wednesday at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus, an instructor began a course by acknowledging he was unqualified to teach it.

The temporary instructor, who is an administrator, told the students that he had to be there so he wouldn’t be fired, Ms. Hester said. He took attendance and noted that the syllabus had been posted online.

When students asked why the syllabus bore a date from another year, Ms. Hester said, the administrator responded by saying he hoped things would get back to normal next week.

At some campuses, though, this was not the first time students and employees found themselves locked out. More than a decade ago, in 2004, federal agents, search warrants in hand, swooped into the company’s offices in eight states, closing schools briefly as they hunted for evidence of fraud related to student recruitment, enrollment, dropout rates, grade inflation, loans, and reported job placements and salaries.

_________________________________________________

For-profit colleges were a magnet for billions of dollars in federalstudent loansand grants to low-income students. In 2010, they gobbled up more than $32 billion, a quarter of all federal financial aid, nearly double their share less than a decade earlier,the Senate committee inquiryfound. Hundreds of millions more flowed in from the Pentagon and veterans’ programs through the G.I. Bill.

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Closure includes Breckenridge Nursing School at Cascade Station in Portland.

The more than 40,000 students and 8,000 employees of ITT Educational Services Inc. on Tuesday grappled with the fallout ofthe for-profit’s announcementthat it would close in response to heightened scrutiny from the federal government.

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

The National Labor Relations Board ruled 3-1 Tuesday that
graduate students working as teaching or research assistants are entitled to
collective-bargaining rights. The case, brought forth by Columbia University
graduate students and the United Automobile Workers (which already backs the
university’s clerical workers, in addition to graduate students at New York
University and the University of Connecticut), is a reversal of a 12-year-old
ruling by the federal board.

Monday, August 8, 2016

Since student debt, free tuition and debt-free higher
education have emerged as presidential campaign-level issues, a narrative has
begun to emerge among elite news media that the rising price of college and
ever-increasing student debt are phantom problems given the overall lifetime
benefits of a college degree. Unfortunately that narrative, which has been
highlighted over the past few weeks to varying degrees by major media outlets,
including NPR and Vox, rests on a pretty narrow set of assumptions about
college and its benefits. And, in fact, it misunderstands the entire point
behind the push for debt-free public college.

For instance, a recent editorial in The Washington Post
titled “Democrats’ Loose Talk on Student Loans” makes the case that we have
more of a nuisance than a crisis on our hands. It argues that bold reforms to
address student debt -- including the plan offered up by Hillary Clinton’s
campaign -- are overkill and that we should presumably make large investments
in other areas (like paying down the national debt). Unfortunately, however,
like other news media these days, the Post editorial board appears to have
overlooked some crucial facts, many of which have been reported by its own
newspaper.

It is absolutely true that some form of postsecondary
education and training has become more important, and nearly essential, in
today’s workforce. Unemployment rates for college graduates are consistently
low, and the average lifetime earnings boost remains high relative to a high
school degree. Anyone who argues that college “isn’t worth it” is doing so with
anecdotal examples or bad data.

But the reason college is so important is not because
earnings for college graduates keep rising. In fact, bachelor’s degree holders
earn about the same amount as they did 30 years ago. Earnings for everyone else
-- including those with only some college experience -- have gone down rapidly.
In effect, a degree has become more a necessary insurance policy than an
investment.

This matters because students are now on the hook for
financing more and more of their own education than ever before. As a result,
graduates are taking on rising levels of debt while contending with stagnant
incomes and the rising cost of health care and child care, all while attempting
to save for retirement or for their own child’s education.

And they are some of the best-off of the bunch -- they’re
able to stretch and make their minimum monthly payments. The true crisis in
student loans is among those who take on student debt but do not graduate, many
of whom attend high-cost for-profit institutions. Those students are more
likely to default or become delinquent on student loans, potentially setting
themselves up for a lifetime of economic hardship. But while some argue that
what we really have is a “completion crisis,” college completion is no better
or worse than it’s been in decades.

Friday, August 5, 2016

Black Lives Matter activists have already successfully
pushed some colleges to address racism on campus and make curriculum more
inclusive. But the movement as a whole has been less visible in the K-12 space.
That’s changing.

As my colleague Vann Newkirk has noted, the Movement for Black
Lives Matter coalition recently published a platform outlining a range of
specific policies it would like to see take shape at the local, state, and
federal levels. The education proposals are rooted in the K-12 space, activists
who helped draft them told me, because the U.S. public-school system is so
broken that college is never an option for many young people of color. And
while many universities are privately controlled, the group sees an opportunity
to return control of K-12 public schools to the students, parents, and
communities they serve.

Public schools, even in the nation’s most affluent cities,
remain highly segregated, with black children disproportionately likely to
attend schools with fewer resources and concentrated poverty. There are more
school security officers than counselors in four of the 10 biggest school
districts in the country. And whereas spending on corrections increased by 324
percent between 1979 and 2013, that on education rose just 107 percent during
the same time.

The coalition’s proposals are wide-ranging and, depending on
who is talking, either aspirational or entirely unrealistic. They range from
calling for a constitutional amendment for “fully funded” education (activists
say federal funding is inadequate and not distributed equally) and a moratorium
on charter schools to the removal of police from schools and the closure of all
juvenile detention centers.

Mostly, said Jonathan Stith, the national coordinator for
the Washington-based Alliance for Educational Justice and one of the lead
authors, the propositions are an attempt to crystallize what the movement
supports and to provide activists with a platform from which to move forward.
“It’s always been clear what we’re against, but [articulating] what we’re for,
what we want to see, was a real labor,” Stith, 41, said. The document is also
an effort to connect education priorities to health care, the economy, criminal
justice, and a range of other public-policy areas, and to, as Stith put it,
force progress “in concert.”.

The plan, which lambasts the “privatization” of education by
foundations that wield fat wallets to shape policy and criticizes
charter-school networks for decimating black communities and robbing
traditional neighborhood schools of resources, drew immediate criticism from
education reformers who see charters and groups like Teach for America (the
plan calls for its demise) as providing badly needed services to students of
color. Some of these reformers said it signaled that the movement was cozy with
teachers’ unions and the status quo. Lily Eskelsen Garcia, the head of the
National Education Association, one of the country’s two main teachers’ unions,
wrote in an emailed comment, “The NEA is honored to stand in solidarity with
Black Lives Matter and proud to be a partner with the organizations that
support community-based solutions to support students and public schools.”

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Bernie Sanders may be out as a presidential contender, but
his proposal to make public college free has worked its way into Hillary
Clinton’s education plan. While the plan is making some private colleges
nervous, his campaign has succeeded in furthering a broader conversation among
university admissions directors about how to make access to higher education
more equitable.

The applicant pools at selective universities don’t
typically reflect the broader population, acknowledged Jim Rawlins, the
director of admissions and assistant vice president of enrollment management at
the University of Oregon, during a recent roundtable discussion with a handful
of other admissions leaders in Washington, D.C. The different schools in
attendance—both public and private, small and large—agreed that needs to
change.

But not all schools are convinced that making in-state
public schools free for students from families earning less than $125,000 a
year by 2021, the gist of Clinton’s plan, is the right approach. Monica Inzer,
the vice president and dean of admission and financial aid at Hamilton College,
a small private school in rural upstate New York, expressed concern that if
such a proposal were to become a reality, some families might not look at
private schools that could be a good fit and equally affordable.

As Jim Nondorf, the vice president for enrollment and
student advancement and dean of admissions and financial aid at the University
of Chicago, said, students often hear a sticker price and don’t realize the
actual cost for low- and even middle-income kids may not be as steep. His
school, for instance, offers need-blind admission and promises to meet 100
percent of a family’s demonstrated need. Hamilton eliminated merit aid in 2007,
and went completely need blind several years later. The school also runs an
emergency aid fund to help students who cannot afford to fly home to visit a
sick parent, or clothes for a job interview. But many schools, including many
historically black colleges, don’t have the funds (Hamilton’s financial aid
budget alone is more than $38 million) to accommodate such students, and losing
middle-class kids to free public schools could make supporting poor students
even harder, or force schools to take only the very richest students who can
pay full price.

“I think what would happen is, we would have to become more
elitist, because anybody who is not really wealthy is going to go to take the
free option,” Sheila Bair, the president of Washington College in Chestertown,
Maryland, told Politico recently. “I don’t want us to be elitist. I want us to
have a diverse student population.”

Monday, August 1, 2016

Albert Einstein often gets credit for words he never spoke,
including these: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not
everything that counts can be counted."

In 1963, the line appeared in the sociologist William Bruce
Cameron’s text Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological
Thinking. Two contemporary sociologists have now brought Cameron’s intuitive
wisdom to life. In their new book, Engines of Anxiety: Academic Rankings,
Reputation, and Accountability, Wendy Nelson Espeland, of Northwestern
University, and Michael Sauder, of the University of Iowa, have added welcome
scholarly heft to widespread anecdotal evidence that U.S. News & World
Report rankings undermine sound decision making and encourage destructive
societal behavior.

Defenders of the rankings argue that they improve
transparency and accountability. The authors suggest a more problematic impact:
Reducing any institution to a single and supposedly objective numerical slot
masks subjectivity inherent in the methodology. Even worse, rankings create
incentives that raise profound ethical issues. Espeland and Sauder prove their
argument with a case study focused on the leading edge of higher education’s
problems: law schools. Deans, professors, and prospective law students should
pay close attention. But if past is prologue, most of them won’t.

Who created this mess?

"When Mort Zuckerman acquired U.S. News & World
Report in 1984 and became its editor," the authors write, "it was a
lackluster news weekly overshadowed by its more successful rivals, Newsweek and
Time." Zuckerman — a Canadian with a law degree from McGill and master’s
of law from Harvard — pursued a business career more consistent with his M.B.A.
from Wharton. He decided to "expand the rankings and issue them annually
as a way to solidify USN’s reputation as the magazine providing ‘news you can
use.’"

Friday, July 29, 2016

The Chronicle of Higher Education
By Jack Stripling and Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz
July 29, 2016

Picture two locomotives barreling down a single track,
heading for a collision as predictable as it is unstoppable. Such is the path
of Janet A. Napolitano and Linda P.B. Katehi, the president of the University
of California and the chancellor of its Davis campus, respectively.

By August 1 the university is expected to receive the
findings of a months-long investigation into whether Ms. Katehi violated system
policies related to her family members’ employment at the university, her
service on corporate boards, and the hiring of companies to suppress
embarrassing internet mentions of the chancellor and the campus.

Ms. Napolitano’s decision to broadcast a litany of specific
charges against the chancellor, wounding her publicly from the start, is in
keeping with what those who have worked with the president describe as her
take-no-prisoners approach. The chancellor’s response, which has included fiery
press releases from a hired crisis manager and the filing of a formal
grievance, surprises few of her colleagues, who describe her as resentful of
criticism.

The face-off between Ms. Napolitano, a former Arizona
governor and U.S. Homeland Security secretary, and Ms. Katehi, who has been
placed on administrative leave, poses a profound leadership test for a
politician-turned-president who is still relatively unschooled in the culture
of academe. And, at its heart, the crisis portends an ugly denouement for Ms.
Katehi, a chancellor who seems forever scarred by a years-old scandal that
destabilized her administration and hardened her instincts toward
self-preservation.

The Chronicle interviewed more than 20 administrators,
professors, regents, and lawmakers for this article. Several former Davis
administrators, who have worked directly with Ms. Katehi, would speak only on
condition of anonymity, citing concerns about divulging information from
private meetings or professional retribution for speaking critically of their former
boss.

Thursday, July 28, 2016

At the Democratic National Convention this week, Bernie
Sanders announced that his successful rival, Hillary Clinton, had adopted one
of his most popular proposals: Free tuition at public colleges.

"During the primary campaign, Secretary Clinton and I
both focused on this issue but with different approaches," the Vermont
Senator noted. "Recently, however, we have come together on a proposal
that will revolutionize higher education in America. It will guarantee that the
children of any family [in] this country with an annual income of $125,000 a
year or less – 83 percent of our population – will be able to go to a public
college or university tuition free. That proposal also substantially reduces
student debt."

This proposal is novel. It's dramatic. It's a broadly scaled
entitlement program for the middle class directed not at older Americans, like
Social Security and Medicare, but for once, at younger Americans.

So let's unpack this idea a little bit.

First of all, what would it cost?

In fiscal year 2014, the most recent year available,
four-year public institutions collected $58 billion in tuition. Since 2011,
they've collected more in tuition and fees than from all state sources
combined.

Currently, the federal government spends $31 billion on
federal grants and work-study to all institutions, not just four-year public
schools. So the cost of eliminating tuition would be around double that (maybe
less, since some of that grant money already goes to tuition).

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Akerman Hall is a gateway to the complex that houses the
University of Minnesota’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. But wandering
through it is more like an experience in archeology.

First, there’s the former airplane hangar, built in 1948 and
renovated five years ago with alumni contributions into a state-of-the-art
student lounge, faculty office, and lab. Then come drab cinderblock corridors
and classrooms that also date from the 1940s and don’t look anywhere near as
glamorous. Behind them, however, are more than $5 million of unseen upgrades
the university was forced to make to elevators, sprinklers, fire alarms, and
ventilation systems so old the school was buying replacement parts on eBay.

These hallways lead to another handsomely appointed wing for
which a dean scraped up some wealthy donors to make the kinds of improvements
that are essential to compete for students in a hot field such as engineering.

But just upstairs from that are offices for English faculty
with cracked and peeling window frames, sputtering air conditioners poking
through walls, and plywood over some of the glass. This floor is still waiting
for a badly needed overhaul—but there isn’t any money in the budget.

“You’re looking at the ‘before,’” said Brian Swanson, the
assistant vice president for university services, finance, and strategy.

Monday, July 25, 2016

The City University of New York’s faculty members are
divided over a tentative contract and a longstanding question: Just how much
can adjunct instructors expect to gain by belonging to unions?

CUNY’s faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress, says
part-time faculty members should celebrate the gains it has made on their
behalf in a hard-fought labor agreement. But many part-time instructors and
graduate assistants oppose ratification of the new contract, arguing that it
represents more of a defeat than a victory.

The agreement, accepted by CUNY’s administration and board
last month, would offer many of the university system’s part-time instructors
both much more job security and access to health insurance that they previously
lacked. It would not substantially increase their pay, however, and would do
little to close gaps between their earnings and those of their full-time
counterparts.

Barbara Bowen, president of the Professional Staff Congress,
last week said her union had "secured an enormous defensive victory"
by winning the new contract and the state’s pledge of funds to cover it,
especially considering that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, at that point had
proposed a steep cut in state support for the university system.

While acknowledging that her union’s leaders view the
agreement as far from perfect, Ms. Bowen nonetheless argued that "it is
strongly in members’ interest to ratify the contract," because otherwise
the union risks losing whatever ground it has gained.

Thursday, July 14, 2016

The students started trying to understand one another by
explaining the origins of their names, then conveying their cultural identity
in three objects.

Mike, a sophomore criminal-justice major, said his Brazilian
parents hoped his name would make him sound more American, "whatever that
means," he added, smiling. He sat with his hands in his coat pockets and
the zipper pulled up to his mouth on the first day of a course about race here
at the University of Maryland, where the goal was to re-examine a lifetime of
assumptions in two-hour shifts.

On the second day, Mike brought his objects in a Timberland
box, from the boots he started wearing in North Newark, N.J., where lots of
black and Hispanic kids did. The objects included a collection of press
clippings about homicides in his neighborhood and a photograph of his
5-year-old nephew, Matthew, to help him remember his obligations back home.

Across from him sat Lindi, who grew up in Chevy Chase, Md.,
a wealthy suburb of Washington. She held up the bow hair clip she’d earned as
captain of her high-school cheerleading team; a small box in the shape of
Africa, because she had lived in South Africa for the first month of her life;
and a Hamsa, a symbol to ward off evil spirits she got on a free trip to Israel
for young Jews.

"I didn’t realize how much of a minority I was until I
was in the majority," she said of the trip. Back in the United States, she
said, she tried to eat out on Easter but found restaurants closed.

On seven Tuesdays this spring, The Chronicle watched as 14
students met in a course dedicated to discussing race, a perennial, at times
explosive issue on campuses and across the country. Maryland offers the course
as part of an effort to make students more proficient with difference — to help
them have thorny conversations on uncomfortable topics, see the value of other
people’s experiences, and gain some perspective on their own. At least, that’s
the hope. But how potent a tool can talk be?

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

It’s been a big few weeks for the movement to replace
commercial textbooks with free online materials, thanks to the sudden rise of
something called the Zero Textbook Cost degree.

In June, 38 community colleges announced plans to make free
online materials standard in every course in some degree programs as part of a
new effort coordinated by Achieving the Dream. Just a few weeks later, Gov.
Jerry Brown of California, a Democrat, signed a 2016-17 budget that includes $5
million for community colleges in the state to create their own ZTC degrees.

Hal Plotkin, a longtime advocate of open education
resources, or OER, says the moves could eventually save students billions of
dollars. As he argued in a recent commentary, California’s new ZTC program is
"easily the most ambitious state-level effort to promote the use of OER in
public higher education to date."

Yet while cheering both the California and Achieving the
Dream initiatives, Mr. Plotkin, a senior open-policy fellow at Creative Commons
USA, argues that college leaders could and should be doing far more to promote
the use of free, openly licensed materials, to prevent publishers from treating
students "like walking cash registers."

Monday, July 11, 2016

As a more racially and socioeconomically diverse body of
students pursues college in the United States, schools find themselves
responding to more requests to stock food pantries and hand out vouchers for
supplies at campus bookstores.

Universities have different reasons for offering students
emergency help when things go wrong unexpectedly. Some of them are
humanitarian. But, as a new report from NASPA: Student Affairs Professionals in
Higher Education points out, many colleges are creating emergency-aid programs
in part to increase graduation rates, particularly among first-generation,
low-income students, and students of color, who make up a growing number of
college goers but often drop out at higher rates than their white and affluent
peers.

NASPA looked at 523 schools across various sectors of the
higher-education landscape—public and private, two-year and four-year
colleges—surveying vice presidents for student affairs and financial-aid
directors. While nearly 75 percent of respondents said their school had some
sort of emergency-aid program, most also said that need outpaces resources, and
few actually use data to figure out which students are most at risk of
quitting, in part because they’re already overwhelmed by requests.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

hen Patrick Elliott came to Claremont McKenna College last
fall for his freshman year, tensions at the private liberal-arts institution
were reaching a boiling point. In November protests over the college’s racial
climate — including two hunger strikes — erupted on the campus, eventually
leading to the resignation of the dean of students.

Those efforts "sparked a ton of conversation,"
said Mr. Elliott, a rising sophomore who is now chair of the diversity and
inclusion board for the student government, the Associated Students of
Claremont McKenna College. "It sparked a lot of dissent, but it provided
CMC with the catalyst to have these conversations."

Mr. Elliott is a member of a steering committee for the
college’s Personal and Social Responsibility Initiative. He and other students
on the committee — which also has representatives from the faculty, staff,
administration, and Board of Trustees — work with administrators to develop new
diversity projects on the campus.

Now the administration is confronting the challenges of
meeting student demands. While administrators stress the importance of
compromise, patience, and careful planning, some students say there isn’t
enough communication on what the college is doing to promote inclusivity.

Claremont McKenna is far from the only campus that is
grappling with months-old student demands; dozens find themselves in similar
situations. But the small Southern California campus was one of the first to
begin responding to its students’ cries for better inclusivity. The slow
negotiation that ensued illustrates just how difficult it will be for students
and administrators across the country to satisfy everyone involved.

Friday, July 1, 2016

Perhaps no U.S. education secretary has had more personal
experience with the power America’s public-school system has to lift up
students who have the odds stacked against them than John King. At least when
it works as intended.

A Puerto Rican and African American whose parents had both
passed away by the time he was 12, King has repeatedly credited New York public
schools for saving his life and shaping its trajectory. King attended P.S. 276
in Canarsie and Mark Twain Junior High School in Coney Island, at the time both
diverse schools that exposed him not only to high-quality curriculum, but to
students and teachers from backgrounds and cultures wildly different from his
own.

“As a kid, it gave me a sense of different cultural
experiences that people had and different traditions that people had, and as a
parent, that has been an important part of thinking about the schools for my
daughters,” King said during an interview at his Washington, D.C., office.

On Friday, Secretary King will call on parents and teachers
at the National PTA Convention in Orlando to create diverse schools where
students of all racial and socioeconomic backgrounds have access to good
teachers and learning opportunities like he did. “Like math and reading, like
science, social studies, and the arts, diversity is no longer a luxury,” King
will say. “It’s essential for helping our students get ready for the world they
will encounter after high school and, increasingly, throughout their lives.”

Research has long suggested that all students benefit when
they attend diverse schools. But many schools remain largely segregated and
those that serve children of color tend to have less-experienced teachers,
fewer advanced courses, and resources stretched thin. And while more than half
of the nation’s students are now children of color, more than 80 percent of
teachers are white, and the majority are female.

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

When the nation’s leading defender of faculty rights decides
to rebuke a college, its precise language may leave close observers scratching
their heads. Why, for instance, did it vote this month to sanction the
University of Iowa over its controversial presidential search, instead of the
board, which it explicitly identified as the bad actor?

The answer: It has long believed it has no other choice.

The American Association of University Professors imposes a
penalty known as "sanction" against colleges for violations of shared
governance, but its bylaws preclude it from directing sanctions at governing
boards, no matter how responsible they might be. It imposes a separate category
of penalty, "censure," for violations of tenure or academic freedom.
With censures it has the option of directing the rebuke at the board, but it
almost always opts to censure the college itself if administrators have any
culpability.

Experience has taught the association that governing boards
will shrug off its warnings and reprimands unless they’re convinced that their
actions will cause a college to suffer from being on the AAUP’s lists of
censured or sanctioned institutions.

Recent developments, however, have prompted the AAUP to
begin reconsidering how it challenges boards.

The weaknesses of its current approach came into focus at
its annual meeting here this month. Top officials of the association bemoaned
how it is struggling to fight off increasingly common board overreach in
colleges’ affairs, and heard faculty leaders at the University of Iowa protest
the AAUP’s sanction of that institution for the actions of a statewide
governing board.

Monday, June 27, 2016

In U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s 4 to 3
majority opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas, in which he upheld racial
preferences in college admissions, he recalls that the court has said that
enrolling a diverse student body “promotes cross-racial understanding, helps to
break down racial stereotypes and enables students to better understand persons
of different races.” Equally important, according to the court’s previous
decisions, “student body diversity promotes learning outcomes and better
prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society.”

Unfortunately, Justice Kennedy’s decision significantly
undermines the very goals the court hopes to achieve. Also unfortunate is that
his memory is conveniently selective: he seems to have forgotten much of what
he himself wrote in 2013’s Fisher I decision.

That’s a shame, because the country seemed ready to finally
put an end to government discrimination on the basis of race and to have it
start judging all people on the content of their character rather than the
color of their skin, as Martin Luther King Jr. admonished. The court has long
suggested racial preferences in admissions were temporary, and in Fisher I,
Justice Kennedy set the stage to finally end them. In that opinion, he wrote:
“Judicial review must begin from the position that ‘any official action that
treats a person differently on account of his race or ethnic origin is
inherently suspect.’”

Thursday, June 23, 2016

To many observers, the Supreme Court’s 4-to-3 decision on
Thursday that upheld the use of race-conscious admissions at the University of
Texas at Austin came as a surprise.

Even inside the court, it seems: “Something strange has
happened,” wrote Justice Samuel A. Alito in the first line of his dissent,
“since our prior decision in this case.” In 2013 the court ruled that a lower
court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, had not applied enough
scrutiny to Austin’s admissions program, and ordered it to revisit the case.
The appeals court then effectively affirmed its prior decision. That judgment
was appealed once again to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in
December.

Some Supreme Court cases were expected to deadlock after
Justice Antonin Scalia, a vocal critic of affirmative action in admissions,
died in February. But his death was not expected to alter the outcome of the
Texas case because Justice Elena Kagan had recused herself. During her time as
U.S. solicitor general, Justice Kagan had been involved with the Obama
administration’s submission of a brief supporting the university. Her recusal
left just seven justices to decide the case.

Many observers expected a 4-to-3 decision striking down the
Texas policy, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy serving as the swing vote.
Instead, he wrote the majority opinion in the case, Fisher v. University of
Texas at Austin, No. 14-981, which upheld the policy.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

State budget crunches and political turmoil have set off
rumblings about a mass faculty exodus from public colleges in some states.
High-profile defections stoke the rumors. But have professors really fled in
droves?

It appears they haven’t. But the threat of departures has
led to plenty of maneuvering behind the scenes, and to other consequences as
well.

Many public colleges in Wisconsin, where legislators
stripped tenure protection and $250 million in support, and in Illinois, where
a state-budget impasse has left campuses in the lurch, didn’t lose
substantially more faculty members to other institutions than in previous
years.

But even if most professors are staying put, many have
considered leaving. Some have quietly entered the job market, and others may
soon follow. Meanwhile, universities elsewhere have escalated efforts to lure
top scholars away from besieged competitors.

Faculty turnover is a fact of academic life, but the forces
squeezing public colleges in several states make the jockeying for jobs a
little more charged this time. Departures have further dimmed already low
morale, even at prestigious flagships. And with budgets trimmed to the quick,
especially at regional universities, the loss of professors who may not be
replaced is felt deeply.

Monday, June 20, 2016

Leaders of the American Association of University Professors
described many of its members as under assault by neoliberal,
bottom-line-focused college governing boards as the group voted on Saturday to
denounce several institutions for trampling faculty rights.

"The attacks are not going to stop," Howard J. Bunsis,
chairman of the AAUP’s Collective Bargaining Congress, warned here at the
association’s annual conference. The threat to tenure, shared governance, and
academic freedom, he said, "mostly comes from those boards of trustees who
come from different worlds than we do," representing business interests
rather than academe.

Frustration with boards’ disregard for AAUP guidelines was a
common theme in several of the group’s votes to censure or sanction college
administrations. Some of the association’s members voiced frustration that its
bylaws require it to direct such votes at institutions rather than the boards
that oversee them.

For example, in unanimously voting to censure the University
of Missouri at Columbia for the firing of a controversial professor without
adequate due process, the AAUP noted that she had been dismissed by the
University of Missouri system’s Board of Curators, under pressure from state
lawmakers. Similarly, in unanimously voting to sanction the University of Iowa
for a lack of faculty involvement in its presidential search, the AAUP noted
that its rebuke was "primarily directed against the Iowa Board of
Regents," which picked the new president. The board also oversees Iowa
State University and the University of Northern Iowa.

Distrust in the University of Illinois Board of Trustees
prompted the AAUP to put the brakes on an effort to lift a censure imposed on
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign last year over its treatment of
Steven G. Salaita. Its decision to pull back came after Harry H. Hilton,
president of the AAUP chapter on that campus, warned from home, in a statement
relayed by an Illinois colleague, that lifting censure too quickly would remove
any incentive for the trustees to adopt new faculty protections proposed by the
campus’s University Senate.